One of the symptoms of globalization is an increased tension between friendship and enmity in international and transnational relationships. This dialectic is enacted through a democratic aesthetic of “telescopic mourning/warring.” US media representations of US–Japan relations from World War II through the funeral of Emperor Hirohito are examined to identify conventional persuasive devices for enacting telescopic mourning/warring and to consider the implications of this aesthetic for the production of a national imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that a democratic aesthetic functions best as a rhetoric of ambivalence operating within the tension between “carnival” and “hegemony.”

Figures of public discourse and imagination such as Davy Crockett model novel subjectivities and participate in the constitution of new frontiers. In the nineteenth century, figures like Crockett embodied the virtues and vices Of combining with nature in speech and deed, while in the twentieth century figures such as cyberspace gurus, images of subjectivity from economic and social theory, and popular culture display the virtues and vices Of combining with the "second nature" of commodities and computers. Engaging new frontier discourses and their characteristic rhetorical ornaments across time, this essay situates figures of speech and culture between the sublime and the ridiculous, pious awe and impious ridicule, and critiques the representative attitudes they cultivate for publics. The fundamental characteristic of a democratic aesthetic as it has been historically realized and imagined, and of which Crockett is an intriguing representative, may be its figural hybridizing of these two rhetorics, sublime/awe and ridicule/impiety.

SPEAKING INTO THE AIR: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF COMMUNICATION. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 293 pp. $26.00 U.S.

This essay attempts to counter the dreariness of postmodern critique and culture by locating the vital force of phantasy, rhetoric, argument, hope, and memory in contemporary public affairs. More particularly, it engages recent controversies about collective memory and the FDR memorial statue especially to generate a greater sensitivity to the fact that we are agents (and not just dupes) of history. The body, symbolic and material, is a core site for the history, theory, and practice of democracy, I argue, and is the hard kernel of collective identification and division. Methodologically, the essay fuses Aristotle and Lacan's ideas about phantasy as a perceptual device, which gages and creates public and personal desire, as an analytic frame for the study of public discourse.

This paper demonstrates the use of an integrated toolset for program understanding. By leveraging the unique capabilities of individual tools, and exploiting their power in combination, the resultant toolset is able to facilitate specific reverse engineering tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. This is illustrated by applying the integrated toolset to several typical reverse engineering scenarios, including code localization, data flow analysis, pattern matching, system clustering, and visualization, using a mid-size production program as the reference system.